Simple & Open Source

May 21, 2015 was a major milestone in the evolution of Holacracy and the emerging ecosystem around it. We invited the community of Holacracy practitioners and stakeholders to a virtual session to announce some major changes to Holacracy itself and to HolacracyOne’s suite of support tools and offerings.

For the past year, we have been pursuing the strategy to “help Holacracy outgrow HolacracyOne”. Here are the highlights of how we’ve responded to this challenge:

The next version of the Holacracy constitution is fully open source with a “free culture” creative commons license. Concretely, it means that you can use it, share it, modify it, and release modified versions of it (as long as you call it something other than “Holacracy”).

The constitution is on GitHub, open to improvement from the community. We’ve put the constitution on GitHub so that practitioners can easily suggest improvements.

Constitution 4.1 is a complete overhaul of version 4.0 with simplified language. The rules are the same, but it uses natural language instead of legalese, and the amount of words is cut by a third. It will launch in early June.

Constitution 5.0 will be launching later this year with updated rules; changes will start showing up in the development version (on GitHub) in June.

In addition to this exciting news about Holacracy, we’re also shifting the focus of our consulting work from primarily implementing Holacracy in organizations to supporting those organizations leveraging it through business processes better aligned with Holacracy’s distributed authority paradigm. This is the next milestone to make Holacracy “stick”.

Below is the recording of the virtual event we held to announce those changes, plus some more.